If you think highway driving requires hard braking, you're a bad driver.
Absolutely agree. I take it a step (probably too far) further and think if you’re breaking on the motorway at all, you’re a bad driver. Ok, sometimes you have to, it’s chaotic out there, I get it. If you’re paying attention to actually driving your two ton killing machine you can drive for 200 miles on a motorway and not touch the break once.
I just had to hard brake a few days ago. A driver a couple lanes over on 101 slammed on their breaks, rotated 90 degrees, and came to rest across a couple lanes (one of which was mine). Fortunately, I was alert, driving the speed limit, and in the right-most lane, with nobody following me close. The whole thing happened in less than 5 seconds.
If you do it on the regular, or even occasionally, sure, but emergencies are emergencies.
Or stuck on a highway with bad drivers. My local paper's current "bleeds => leads" story is about a head-on highway crash, between a big pickup truck and a wrong-way driver. Less that 4 hours after being posted, that story has already slipped off the front page.
It doesn't normally require hard braking, but when automated emergency braking decides to slam on the brakes at random for no reason in my own car, everybody behind me will share my resulting insurance rate increase.
It's almost as if the purpose of the system is what it does.
Yes. If people are constantly moving into your appropriate head way this is doubtless annoying but the correct response is allow yourself to decelerate slowly to re-open that space again, repeat as many times as necessary, even if it means a bunch of agros end up in front of you. Better for them to be in front where you can see them, than behind or to the side, were you can't.